Hong Kong

by Jan Morris

  On the other hand the vast market area which comes to life each evening around Temple Street, in the Yau Ma Tei area of Kowloon, is nothing if not contemporary. Interspersed with hundreds of al fresco restaurants, bubbling and steaming beneath their bright lights, and with shops stacked with cages of twittering birds, the stalls of Temple Street sell everything to do with modernity: everything to do with radios, calculators, computers, car engines, videos, televisions, telephones – every chip and plug and junction box – every distributor head, every kind of cable – new and secondhand, sham and genuine, legal and illicit, pristine, chipped, dented and re-built. Juvenile electronic geniuses wander here and there, inspecting circuits through thick spectacles. Housewives rummage through boxes of light-plugs. A Pekingese is curled up fast asleep upon a doorstep, and a man composedly watches TV on a chair outside his shop, and a woman is selling fish soup out of a huge cauldron, and a butcher is offering bloody eviscerations of sea-turtle, together with yellow-dyed segments of chicken; and through it all the radios blast, the transformers wink, the woman yells recommendations of her soup, the birds deafeningly twitter, the dog sleeps, and a huge good-natured crowd ambles and surges by.

  Nearby there is a place called the Golden Shopping Arcade, which is famous for its counterfeit computerware. The counterfeit has long been a Hong Kong speciality, though nowadays, as the territory grows more sophisticated, many of its counterfeit merchants are moving on to Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and even China. In 1895 Henry Norman complained about counterfeit editions of English books. In 1986 Cartier watches, Dunhill lighters, Cussons Imperial Leather Soap, well-known brands of wine and dish-washing liquid were all being faked in Hong Kong, sometimes under not very subtly misspelled names: the Japanese Sharp Elsinate calculator, for instance, a favourite device of the 1980s, turned up in copyright-evading pseudonyms as the Shrap Elsmate, the Eisimate, the Spadb and the Spado (the Shrap 838 sold especially well in China because of its lucky number – two eights and a three).

  The Golden Arcade is gloriously brash about it. It is a bright emporium, on three floors, divided into multitudinous premises like the old Chinese tenement houses and stuffed to the ceiling with all-but-authentic goods bearing all-but-accurate names. They sell often for a tenth of the original price, sometimes for a twentieth, and there are dealers who will, for a couple of dollars, copy almost any program onto your own computer disk.

  From time to time the authorities clamp down upon this place, seize the more outrageous infringements of copyright and issue stern warnings: but the instinct of the Golden Arcade, which is to a heightened degree no more than the instinct of Hong Kong itself, is impervious to such pedantries, and business soon returns to normal.

  7

  Lounging in the shafts of their ancient vehicles, outside the Star Ferry terminal at Central wait the very last of the rickshaws. They remind me of the very last of the Bath chairs, antediluvian outside the Great Western Railway station in the Somerset of my childhood.

  For a hundred years and more every Hong Kong memoir has made reference to the rickshaws. Every Victorian globe-trotter went for a rickshaw ride as a matter of course, and generations of servicemen, British, American and doubtless Japanese, indulged their high spirits in rickshaw races, or were carried insensible to their ships and barracks by worldly rick-men through the night. Today the venerable survivors of the rickshaw men do not try very hard for custom, only halfheartedly bearding ferry-passengers who look sufficiently inexperienced; and if you ever see a rickshaw actually in service, conveying a doubtless just-arrived visitor through the streets of Central, the frail and stertorous rickshaw man is likely to look as though this really might be his last run, while the passenger almost certainly sits bolt upright behind him in a posture of acute embarrassment.

  Tourism has long been one of Hong Kong’s purposes, but this has never become a tourist city. Its tourist industry is all mixed up with everything else, and those rickshaws are almost the only touristy thing to be seen downtown. There is a reconstructed Song Dynasty Village in the New Territories, and a huge pleasure compound, Ocean Park, above the sea on Hong Kong Island, but in general tourism is incidental to the nature of the place. The shopping districts of Kowloon which cater largely for the tourist trade, with their endless shelves of radios and cameras, their multitudinous tailors and their acres of toys, do not feel like tourist traps, as they would in most of the world’s cities; they seem organic elements of a great merchant centre – more like medieval fairs of Europe than, say, duty-free shops at airports.

  Nevertheless many of the greatest Hong Kong firms have concerned themselves, in one way or another, with the visitors’ trade, whether as an extension of the transport industry, or a useful adjunct to real estate, or a source of foreign currency. Not including Chinese, nearly six million visitors came to Hong Kong in 1990, more than half of them from other Asian countries; and although there are really not many sights to see, except the grand sight of Hong Kong itself, so stimulating is the pace of things, so various is the cuisine, so seductive are the bargains and so exotic the sensations that few tourists seem to go away disappointed. Every week the Tourist Association’s magazine asks visitors what they have enjoyed most; buying a camera, they usually say, but often they mention the food.

  To house this multitude Hong Kong never stops building hotels. Great fortunes have been sustained by the hotel industry, and several of the best-known hongs and merchant families have been hoteliers in their time. Today many of the greatest buildings around the harbour are hotels, from the dignified old Peninsula at Tsim Sha Tsui to the glassy palaces of the big international chains, with their preposterously accoutred doormen and their statutory indoor waterfalls; in obscurer sites behind, especially among the garish streets of Kowloon, thousands of lesser hostelries proliferate, ranging from modestly respectable family lodgings to houses of frank disrepute.

  There have been good hotels in Hong Kong since 1866, when the Hong Kong Hotel was opened on the site of the defunct Dent and Company’s offices, immediately beside Pedder Wharf. Its restaurant was nicknamed ‘The Grips’, nobody seems to know why, and it became at once a centre of local social activity, as well as the place into which every first-class traveller, escaping with relief from shipboard life, fell as soon as possible after disembarkation. It appears in many an old photograph, looking sombre but comfortable enough, rather like some of the old imperial hotels which still precariously survive in India, Pakistan and Burma, and described itself in 18926 as being ‘the most commodious and best-appointed hotel in the Far East’. It had bathrooms en suite, its bedrooms were gas-lit, its grill-room served chops or steaks at any hour, and it was equipped with ‘hydraulic ascending-rooms of the latest and most approved type’. In later years it became almost a parody of the British colonial style; Chinese were banned from some of its public rooms, and when in 1926 fire broke out in the east wing, raging for two days and nights despite the efforts of fire brigades, army detachments and men from the warships in harbour, afternoon tea was served as usual in the west wing.

  The Hong Kong Hotel survived into the 1940s, but by then had long been overtaken by the glamorous Peninsula and its sibling the Repulse Bay Hotel. The Peninsula flourishes still, but the Repulse Bay Hotel is perhaps the most universally mourned of all the buildings torn down during Hong Kong’s relentless development of the 1980s. It was a dear old place, beloved by many for its view over the bay between Stanley and Aberdeen. Its famous teas, its wicker chairs, its string orchestras, its verandah above the beach – all these were the very epitome of British colonial life. Where it used to stand, now surrounded by high-rise apartment blocks, they have built a replica of its restaurant, scrupulous in architecture as in potted plants; but it can never be the same.

  The top hotels of Hong Kong are among the best anywhere, and are repeatedly voted so in polls among readers of travel magazines. Competition between them is intense. As the launches used to outdo each other in smartness, when they went to pick
up passengers from the ocean liners, so rival Mercedes and Rolls-Royce limousines nowadays attend the hotel guest arriving at Kai Tak. Ever more exclusive fashion designers show their clothes in the salons of the great hotels, ever more powerful companies hold their annual conferences there, ever grander chefs from Europe, from India, from China, from California are invited to display their cuisines. Except perhaps for Manhattan in the years between the world wars, I doubt if there has ever been a city in which the hotel has played so prominent a social role.

  Some of the hostelries are quintessentially Hong Kong. The Peninsula, with its enormous lobby, chic restaurants and rooftop heliport, figures in almost every description of the place. The Kowloon Hotel offers a computer in every bedroom. The Island Shangri-la provides CD players.7 A plaque at the Hilton used to mark the table where Richard Hughes, an Australian journalist who was for years probably the best-known of Hong Kong expatriates,8 liked to drink with his friends and brainpickers. And for the moment there are few institutions more pungently characteristic of fin d’Empire Hong Kong than the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Central, which was opened in 1963 and has repeatedly been nominated the Best Hotel In The World.

  The Mandarin was the first of a new generation of grande luxe Asian hotels, but unlike the chain hotels which were to follow it, stood demonstrably in the line of the imperial caravanserai – the Peninsula across the water in Kowloon, Raffles in Singapore, the Galle Face in Colombo, the Taj Mahal in Bombay, Shepheard’s in Cairo. Its style is one of self-effacing but extremely expensive sophistication, rather like the style of your contemporary British taipan, and its roots in fact go back to the beginnings of British Hong Kong, for it was an offshoot of the Hong Kong Land Company, in which Jardine’s held a powerful interest. The hotel looks one way across Statue Square to the Hong Kong Club, another across Des Voeux Road towards the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and a third across Connaught Road to the waterfront skyscrapers and the harbour. Once its front rooms all faced directly across the water, but since the buildings that have since interrupted the view were all built by Hong Kong Land too, there could be no complaining – and actually the Mandarin’s present condition of enclosure, surrounded fraternally by such fabulously opulent neighbours, only enhances its cherished sense of Establishment.

  Nobody could call it a beautiful building. Designed by the local architectural firm Leigh and Orange, who have been in Hong Kong since 1874, it looks rather squat and ordinary. However the moment its Rolls drops you at its front door you know you have struck quality. Hardly have the doormen courteously opened the door for you than a most elegant young assistant manager, Chinese or European and tending only slightly towards the starchy, is welcoming you to the hotel as he might welcome a distant, well spoken of and by all accounts extremely wealthy relative. How glad he is to see you! How genuinely he hopes your jet-lag isn’t too bad! How swiftly, giving you all his attention, he ushers you to your room – no need to check in, Good Lord no, we can see to all that kind of thing when you’ve had time to freshen up and enjoy a cup of Chinese tea!

  The Mandarin is British-owned but cosmopolitanly run. Its manager, as I write, is Irish, its concierge Italian, its front office manager Chinese and the four-piece band that plays gentle swing at tea-time is a family of Filipinos. It has eight foreign chefs, 123 Chinese, Thai and Indian. It flies in its cheeses and hams from France, its steaks from the United States, and frequently has gastronomic festivals when it flies in chefs too from famous restaurants around the world.

  It sees itself among the company of the discreet luxurious hotels that have their epitomes in Europe, and especially perhaps in London, and has no lounge-cataracts, fancy-dress doormen or revolving restaurants. Its interior décor, restrained and adult, is by the eminent theatrical designer Don Ashton; a running motif, appearing throughout the hotel, is the Seal of the Grand Secretary, mandarin of mandarins in the old Chinese Empire. Everything is just sufficiently orientalized to make you feel you might be sleeping in the guest quarters of one of the more traditional Anglo-Chinese hongs – a contemporary version perhaps of Jardine’s old No. 1 House. For many years a soignée White Russian widow lived in the hotel (you could recognize her room from the outside by its profusion of potted plants), and moved about the building not like a customer at all, but absolutely like a friend of the taipan.

  In short the Mandarin Hotel is an overt version of an inner Hong Kong style – the style of the loftier British of the China coast, tempered by long years of comfort and assimilation in the east. Once a month the Governor gives a luncheon party there, attended by a varying guest list of worthies; rather like the luncheons the Queen of England now and then gives at Buckingham Palace, though the victuals may be better.

  8

  Nevertheless buying and selling, even speculating and servicing, are no longer the chief functions of Hong Kong. Since 1950, when the United Nations clamped an embargo upon trade with Communist China, Hong Kong has turned itself into one of the world’s great manufactories.

  There were industries in the territory before. There were the traditional fishing, quarrying, shipbuilding and farming industries. There had long been industries making joss-sticks. In the nineteenth century Hong Kong preserved ginger was patronized by Queen Victoria herself, and was consequently to be found on all the most fashionable English dinner-tables. Sugar-refining flourished for a time, cloths and cottons were made, the Do Be Chairful Company were well-known makers of rattan furniture. There was a wolfram mine in the New Territories – once the miners had been persuaded the earth-spirits would not be angered, they made themselves an underground town, complete with shops, houses, markets, cafés, bars and even brothels. After the Second World War Hong Kong went in for cheap and nasty toys, and for electric torches, a speciality it has retained. The victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war expelled to Hong Kong a powerful group of Shanghai manufacturers, who often brought their work forces with them – sometimes even their machinery – and established in the territory a vigorous textile industry.

  But it was the Korean War embargo that sealed the development. Chinese Hong Kong, in particular, heeded the example of those astute and adaptable newcomers from Shanghai, who had been driven out of one profitable society, and had shown themselves determined not to be impoverished in another. The first sign of changing philosophies was the sudden emergence of an artificial flower industry, a trade until then dominated by the Italians; thereafter factories of all kinds erupted, especially in Kowloon, which now dramatically burgeoned.

  To start with they were mostly hole-in-corner affairs, in lofts and backyards, in ramshackle warehouses, frequently in squatters’ huts and sometimes even on board sampans. Hong Kong industries then were often Dickensian: sweatshop workers labouring terrible hours for miserable wages, small children assembling toys or picking at fabrics, makeshift machinery improperly protected, squalid conditions, ruthless methods, fantastic production levels and enormous profits.

  It was an ugly thing to see in the enlightened 1950s. Though its exploiters, like its exploitees, were nearly all Chinese, the Hong Kong Government was repeatedly anathematized, in the House of Commons at Westminster as in the pages of newspapers around the world, for its slavish devotion to laissez-faire – for years it even declined to produce proper industrial statistics. But at however high a social cost, temporarily deprived of one function Hong Kong permanently acquired another.

  Gradually that explosion of productivity was brought into some sort of order, and Hong Kong industry began to conform with international norms. Factory conditions became less awful, wages more humane, the exploitation of children less blatant. The ad hoc nature of it all gave way to more contemporary organization; by the 1970s Hong Kong industry was relatively respectable, and the colony was no longer an underdeveloped country with a sophisticated entrepreneurial superstructure, but one of the world’s great productive Powers. The 418 registered factories of 1939, the 1,266 of 1948, had become by 1986 148,623. It was the most phenomenall
y rapid of all the world’s industrial revolutions.

  Now Hong Kong stands, they say, sixteenth among them all, exporting, with its 6.4 million population, more than India’s 880 million. Its average wages are second only to Japan’s in Asia. Critics say it is still too improvisatory or even amateurish of method, too dependent upon cheap labour and traditional management, and that there is a growing shortage of sufficiently advanced technicians. Nevertheless the territory shows no signs of falling back. Every quarter a fat and glossy catalogue is produced, to show prospective customers what Hong Kong is producing, and it makes startling and curious reading. Such endless variety of ingenuity, given to the world by such splendid-sounding concerns – the Grand Dragon Universal Sales Company, the Ever-Rich Industrial Company, or the perhaps unfortunately named Flying Junk Industrial Company Ltd!

  Here is a radio you can float in your bath, here an electronic stud-finder. A hair-dryer is combined with an electric iron, a calculator with a paper-clip. There are electronic ashtrays. There are sonic rat-repellers. There are devices for the detection of counterfeit money. There are dolls of a thousand faces, and armouries of toy machine-guns. Hong Kong is the world’s largest exporter of textiles, toys and watches. It prints books in every language, and makes more films for the cinema than anywhere else except India.

  The little colony thus qualifies as one of the most intensely productive regions of the world. Yet surprisingly little of it shows. There are few factory chimneys in Hong Kong, few great industrial complexes; it is as though all that work is done in secret, hidden away in back streets of the urban mass.

  9

  Even now much of this energy can be traced back, in one way or another, to the British hongs which we saw establishing themselves in the 1840s, congratulating themselves in the Victorian prime.